There are times when you could be at the top of your game. Painting well, painting in a good rhythm, creating masterpieces on a regular basis. But still the satisfaction of creating them is a short lived one. This little voice in your head starts whispering in your ear and keeps telling you that you have become too comfortable. And when that happens it is a tricky area to be in for an artist. You know you are in a good place and common sense tells you to enjoy it as long as it lasts. But then the creator inside you never likes to be ‘comfortable’ and wants to create something new. And funnily enough this situation is the trigger to reinventing oneself; Yet another creative process of making art.
I too am trying to reinvent myself and in this post I’ll share my method which I have followed till now.
The Comfort Zone Trap
The comfort zone builds up slowly. But it surely happens multiple times in a creative journey. Its a nice place to be in, but not for long. Because the more you get attached to it the more difficult it becomes for the artist in you to develop. So its good to be aware of this fact and just keep doing a sanity check once in a while if you are getting into the trap. A close look at your recent works will help you. Check if a certain pattern is glaring at you from those works. Check if you are getting repetitive. Do an honest assessment and your works will tell you if you are slipping into a comfort zone.
Well I did not do any such checks. I just strongly felt I need to do something new. And that I guess came from subconsciously seeing a pattern in my works.
Starting From Blank
You have identified that you are in a comfort zone and you want to break out from it. But now what. How do you let go of your style to do something new that you are not even aware of. This is a good problem to solve in the creative process of making art. I am going to tell you the process I followed and its just one way of doing things. You can invent your own method. You can even try my method. It is fun by the way.
I started from blank. I also made sure that I don’t use my regular paper, brushes and palette. First I arranged my paper, paint and brushes around me so that I can start painting as soon as I want to. Then I randomly picked a reference photo without looking at it and then closed my eyes. Next I visualized darkness and meditate on that to allow my mind to become empty. At some point I opened my eyes, looked at the reference pic for a few seconds and then started painting. I just let my hand move as fast as possible in a subconscious and spontaneous manner. I took around 10-15 minutes to paint and then went away from my easel. When I came back to it after sometime I tried to find a new visual language in it which I can pick up and explore further.
Explore and Allow Yourself to Fail
And I did find something I could pick up on. In this case because of the nature of the paper I had to limit my washes to light ones and number of layers to only two. And as I had ‘thrown’ paint at the paper, some parts of the painting was not painted. I had taken a spontaneous decision and had ‘drawn’ the unpainted parts with a rigger brush using black paint. So I decided to try these things out. That is
- ‘Throwing Paint and leaving a lot of white of the paper
- Limiting maximum layers to only two
- ‘Drawing’ with rigger to suggest the unpainted parts.
Now again this step is about exploration just like the last step. But this is more conscious while the previous step was more subconscious effort. In this step as you can see from the pictures I was trying different ways of ‘throwing’ paint and leaving out whites and also different ways of drawing the unpainted details. Some seem to work while other did not. The idea here is to paint with abandon and try things without fear. The more you fail the more you learn. Allow yourself to fail in this step of Creative Process of making Art.
Finding the ‘New’
The whole idea behind the previous step of conscious exploration is to get used to the new thing you have found and establish it in your mind. The paintings that did not work teach you what to avoid and the ones that worked teach you what looks good. This way your decision making becomes better in your new found style. And as you keep painting more and more holding on to the spirit of the new method this decision making gets more refined and your muscle memory also get stronger. And then there comes a time when you become really good at it and the next comfort zone sets in. And then its time to break the barriers all over again.
As far as my exploration goes there was a divine intervention. One of my idols happened to nudge me a little to align me to the right direction through a comment on one of the works I posted on Facebook. Now I’ll try to look for subjects to suit this new style and keep refining it. As I keep at it hopefully I’ll find a new visual language somewhere on the way. And again hopefully that would lead to a set of accomplished and satisfying works till I get dissatisfied again.